Government Proceeds with Plan to Detain Asylum Seekers
‘Infiltrators imprisonment plan unrealistic’
June 4, 2012 (Ynet)
Illegal, unrealistic and inhumane, that is how human rights groups dubbed the Immigration Authority’s announcement that it will begin to implement the legal directive allowing the detention of illegal migrants for up to three years. […] Attorney Oded Feller from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said that the government was “selling the public fantasies. There isn’t enough room to hold those who are already here and those that will come in the future.
“Instead of dealing with reality, by which the majority of the infiltrators are asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan, the Interior Ministry chooses to detain them for nothing.”
Proposed Bill to Legalize Outposts
Israel’s parliament rejects bill to legalize outposts
June 6, 2012 (Middle East Online)
Israeli MPs on Wednesday voted down a bill to retroactively legalise settler homes built on private Palestinian land, quashing an attempt to circumvent the court-ordered demolition of an outpost.
[…] The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said the bills were “a step up in trampling the individual rights of Palestinians and in the contempt for the rule of law in the Occupied Territories, while blatantly disregarding High Court rulings.”
It’s the Occupation, Stupid (Op-Ed by Hagai El-Ad, ACRI’s Executive Director)
June 10, 2012 (+972mag)
[…] For 45 years, “Judea, Samaria and Gaza have been under the State’s belligerent occupation. They are not part of the State of Israel.” Unflinching words from Israel’s Supreme Court justices, when discussing the decision to pull out of Gaza. No vague message or double-speak. The occupied territories are in fact as their title implies: they are not part of Israel.
Moreover, there are only few known government positions that have not changed for a generation. The words above offer a unique example, for they reflect the government’s position “since the Six-Day War and to this day,” as indicated by the Supreme Court. Hence, Israel’s stated position in the matter is not only crystal clear, but it has also been reaffirmed time and again, unchanged, for four and a half decades.
Poverty in East Jerusalem
Refugees Crowd Behind Five-Star Checks
June 5, 2012 (Inter Press Service)
[…] “The gravity of the situation in East Jerusalem is the product, first and foremost, of Israeli policy making. For decades Israel has pursued a policy that has led to the debilitation of East Jerusalem in every respect,” wrote The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) in a report titled ‘Policies of Neglect in East Jerusalem’ released last month.
Including Nursing Care in Healthcare Basket
Lost in the high-cost maze of long-term health care
June 7, 2012 (Haaretz)
Rami Adut, director of the Right to Health Program at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, is a member of the interdisciplinary project to push for subsidized nursing care. She says nursing is as critical an issue as the cost of living in Israel, which was the focus of the widespread protest movement last summer.
[…] “If the heads of that protest movement had been two or three decades older, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have seen nursing also at the top of their agenda,” Adut says.
The Fight for Marriage Equality in Israel
‘With this ring I thee wed’: The turbulent battle for same-sex marriage in Israel
June 9, 2012 (Times of Israel)
Gay couples who marry outside of Israel — and who are recognized as married by the government where their wedding took place — are then registered as married by the Ministry of the Interior despite not being recognized as married by the rabbinate. They enjoy most of the rights and benefits accorded to opposite-sex married couples.
[…] The precedent came about when Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, represented two gay couples at the High Court of Justice in 2005. The couples had married in Toronto and were demanding that Israel register them as married. In 2006, a court panel voted 6-1 that gay couples who married elsewhere would be registered as married.
The Prawer Plan
Bedouin are ‘squatters’ on their own land
June 11, 2012 (The National)
In a report released in April, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel used phrases such as “grossly violate” and “enshrine wholesale discrimination” to describe the Prawer Plan’s effect on Bedouin.
These organisations fear its implementation could shatter what were once cordial relations between the Israeli government and its Bedouin citizens, some of whom serve in the military.
Knesset Legal Adviser Cedes Problematic Nature of ‘Nakba Law’
Upgraded ‘Nakba Law’ may be undemocratic, counsel says
June 12, 2012 (Israel Hayom)
Penalizing academic institutions that allow the commemoration of the Palestinian “catastrophe” (or Nakba) may be unconstitutional, Knesset Legal Advisor Eyal Yinon told lawmakers Monday.
[…] In January, the High Court of Justice rejected a petition to strike down the Nakba Law. In their decision, the justices said that while the petitioners raised important issues for the Israeli public, it was too early to gauge the constitutionality of the law.
The petition was filed by Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel as well as Arab and Jewish citizens. They claimed that the law compromised basic constitutional rights, including freedom of speech.
Amidst Social Justice Protests, ACRI Protects Right to Demonstrate
Social justice activist questioned despite ban
June 14, 2012 (Jerusalem Post)
Police questioned and searched the apartment of a social justice activist in Jerusalem despite a ban that Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch issued on such police tactics, activists said Wednesday.
[…] “In a democratic state, police do not investigate protesters for planning a demonstration, and certainly does not ask to search their houses in order to locate materials used for demonstrations,” said Lila Margalit, an attorney for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel.
Freedom of Assembly (Op-Ed by Hagai El-Ad, ACRI’s Executive Director)
June 28, 2012 (The Daily Beast)
When Israeli police addressed the social justice demonstrators in Tel Aviv and announced, “this is not social justice—these are rioters,” they were only partially correct. It is true that, despite the previous summer’s massive protests, there still is no social justice. Exploitative contract labor practices, the privatization of education, withering services for the unemployed, salary gaps, and record-setting inequality all testify to this.
[…] But the second half of the sentence—”these are rioters,”—that part is incorrect. The Israeli Police were trying to depict the social justice demonstrators of 2012 as a violent mob.
“Human Rights Organizations Keep Israel Democratic”
Israel’s Best Friends
June 18, 2012 (The Forward)
[…] For those aware of the past three years of attacks on Israel’s human rights community, such sensitivity to international human rights law is no small thing. Since this government came to power, official attempts to penalize and defund human rights groups have advanced without shame or pretense. Human rights activists have been threatened more than once with parliamentary investigations and have been denounced as anti-Zionist or worse.
[…] The activists of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, Adalah, Peace Now and a dozen other organizations are in some sense the front-line fighters for Israeli democracy, struggling for an Israel whose own democratic institutions will hold it accountable and whose own moral sense will determine its future
ACRI and Adalah Attorneys Awarded Goldberg Peace Prize
Arab, Jewish lawyers win award for advancing peace
June 19, 2012 (Jerusalem Post)
Attorney Hassan Jabareen, founder and director of Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and Attorney Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), were declared the winners on Monday of the 2012 Victor J. Goldberg IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East.
ACRI’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, said the prize was a “remarkable achievement” and praised Yakir’s and Jabareen’s “dedication, conviction, and courage.”
Discrimination in Planning and Building in the Occupied Territories
Rights groups: State practices ‘zoning Apartheid’
June 24, 2012 (Ynet)
NGOs that include the Association for Human Rights in Israel (ACRI) and the Bimkom organization claim that the Civil Administration, which governs the territory, applies unequal policies to Palestinians and Jews in the area, branding the practice as a “zoning apartheid.”
[…] The administration’s response is unacceptable,” said Attorney Raghad Jaraisy of ACRI. “This is not a new village, but one that already has water and electricity infrastructure. The administration has a duty, as per the international humanitarian law, to protect the lives of the occupied territory’s residents, and to make changes in a manner that would raise their quality of life.”
Preventing “Price Tag” Attacks
NGOs warn of settler violence, call for preemptive action
June 25, 2012 (Times of Israel)
Human rights organizations called upon Israeli security authorities Monday to prevent any “price tag” actions that may arise in the wake of a number of planned evacuations of settlers.
[…] The groups — Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual; Yesh Din, B’Tselem; the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI); and Rabbis for Human Rights — cautioned the three that there could be “possible settler reprisals” to upcoming evacuations and urged a ”planned and proactive approach.”
